The Premier Blog For Quickly Improving Your Public Speaking, Presentation & Communication Skills
Congratulations – you’ve been invited to speak for 30 minutes. Remember – don’t use any notes! If you got this offer could you do it? As though standing in front of a group of people was not scary enough, now you have to find a way to shove 30 minutes (that’s 1,800 seconds) worth of … Read more
So you’ve been invited to a wedding, a retirement party, or some other celebration in which friends and family are going to gather in order to honor someone. There will probably be some sort of food served, drinks will flow, and then someone will do it – they’ll stand up and give a toast. Oh, … Read more
So just about everyone out there knows who Jack Welch is – he was the CEO and Chairman of GE who lead them from a market valuation of $14B when he took over to a valuation of over $410B when he stepped aside. What many people may not know is that Jack is a great … Read more
Some presentations are designed to simply motivate your audience. Some are designed to educate them. It’s this second batch that is tricky to do. It’s probably not that your presentations are lacking in educational material, but rather it’s the way that you are delivering it that really matters. You need to find a way to … Read more
When we deliver a presentation, we need to make the best use of all of the tools that we have at our disposal. These tools include things such as hand gestures, using pauses, and vocal variety. All too often we forget that we have one more tool for us to use: our personal style. Life … Read more
Previously we had discussed the fact that any presentation that you give is really sort of like a one person show – if you know how to act, then you’ll be more effective. The challenge, of course, is that very few of us have been trained to be an actor. Additionally, we tend to think … Read more
Tis the season for college graduations and I was recently asked to deliver a keynote speech as part of an engineering graduation ceremony. The interesting thing about this speaking opportunity was that I was basically starting from ground zero – I didn’t have an engineering keynote speech in my bag of tricks. This meant that … Read more
So why do you care about how good of a presenter you are? Hey, if you’ve been able to keep from bursting into flames when you address a staff meeting, a department, or even bigger gatherings then haven’t you really done enough? For many people, the answer to this question is “yes”. And they just … Read more
So who among us ever really looks forward to sitting through a technical presentation? Collectively we’ve all sat through so many of these things that we almost defensively shut down before the speaker even has a chance to get started. So when it’s our turn to talk about things that contain lots of financial details, … Read more
Anytime we speak in public it can be a challenge that gets our heart racing and causes us to start to sweat. However, if you really want to take the stress up a notch, then just try talking to a group of teens and watch your heart either start to beat double time or just … Read more